Five of the biggest science breakthroughs in 2015, and a look to the future

Five of the biggest science breakthroughs in 2015, and a look to the future

Although you might still be nursing a post-holiday hangover, don’t close the chapter on 2015 just yet. The past year was chock full of dark, stranger-than-fiction news stories – but in the world of science and technology, landmark research in 2015 drummed up plenty of excitement and optimism for the future. Without further ado, these are my picks for the five breakthroughs in science and technology that mattered in 2015: CRISPR: GENOME HACKING FOR THE MASSES Although CRISPR (an acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats”) was first described in 1987 by Japanese researchers, 2015 was the year this genome-editing technique truly rose to prominence. Like a word processing application, CRISPR is an inexpensive, easy-to-use system that can search for, cut, and paste pieces of DNA in any living organism…